CUWiki:About

From CUWiki

Welcome to CUWiki, the free Cornell encyclopedia anyone can edit.

Goal

The goal of CUWiki is to produce a Wikipedia style website to serve as an encyclopedia of Cornell. Wikipedia cannot address this need as many aspects of Cornell are of interest only to people at Cornell. For example, Denise Cassaro, the well known campus life e-mailer, is an excellent biography entry for Cornellians to read and learn about. Posting such an article on Wikipedia generates a series of negative comments followed by deletion of the entry. "Big Red Bucks" are even more irrelevant to the world at large, but are useful for incoming students to learn about. There is a wide variety of Cornell related entries on Wikipedia, including an excellent Cornell University featured article, but there is a lot more to say which is relevant to people attempting to learn more about Cornell.

Experiment

CUWiki is an experiment with much room to grow. Part of the project, which started as a Computer Science independent study project, is to determine how a larger scale system might be built, how much server technology might be required, what Cornell users want, and what can be achieved. The technology behind Wikipedia involves extensive software for distributing server loads over continents. Learning more about how these server loads are managed through the use of a smaller scale model is central to the CUWiki project. Also, CUWiki will seek to determine what makes a wiki style encyclopedia so appealing not just to use but to edit.

Server Environment

CUWiki is currently hosted at ServInt, a Virgina-based company which provides server hosting at a commercial level. This saves valuable time which would be spent on machine and server maintenance. The physical location, bandwidth resources, and solid reputation of this company make them an attractive choice. The commercial nature of the company’s services provides CUWiki with ample support and a very flexible backend setup. CUWiki is avoiding the use of Cornell resources not only to avoid spending time on server setup, but also to maintain an aspect of separation from Cornell to ensure the site does not become mistakenly labeled as “official”.